The weight of the challenges currently on the shoulders of our nation’s health care professionals has grown increasingly debilitating in the past year and it appears that 2012 will be the same old song. Physicians are starting to recognize their lack of recoveries and collections due to shrinking reimbursements, and a solution is needed. The feeling that your revenue is spinning out of control, is not only daunting, but also nerve-racking. So how do we combat this? It is time to re-evaluate the billing process and look for new medical billing solutions. To help mend this issue, we have created a checklist for you to use in determining where your process can be altered to improve practice revenue and so that your practice can achieve overall success.

Our goal when working with new clients is to help them overcome any hesitations they might have with outsourcing their billing by keeping them in control of the process. It seems that the concerns are usually similar from practice to practice. Physicians want to improve process time and increase revenue, but they also want to maintain control over their payments, personnel and data.

By giving our clients complete access to our live database to produce reports, we keep the lines of communication open and operating in real time. Physicians can see patient accounts and track them on their own, without the behind the scenes hassle. Also, many external billing companies have an inefficient collection process, which includes the company scraping a fee off the top of each service. We don’t work like that.

Another concern is that a billing acquisition will end up serving as an Exodus for the personnel that have been with a practice for so long. Many offices fear that their dedicated staff will be removed and replaced with newbies, which is not true with us. We always vow to retain key individuals at practices, because we don’t believe in fixing something that isn’t broken.

The final concern is that the practice will no longer be in control of its own data. People in “the biz” call this unfortunate side-effect of a poorly operating billing department, “black hole syndrome.’ This is when no one can really be sure what exactly is happening within their own company because they are no longer able to monitor success, progress and inefficiencies. We eliminate that lack of knowledge and replace it with participation so that the staff is a part of the change.